Taoyuan power outages blamed on equipment malfunctions

Taipei, April 18 (CNA) The string of power outages affecting multiple parts of Taoyuan over the past few days was mainly caused by equipment malfunctions, government and Taiwan Power Co. (Taipower) officials said Thursday.

Speaking at the Cabinet's weekly press briefing, Deputy Economics Minister Chen Chern-chyi (陳正祺) said the outages were due to problems with power distribution, rather than power generation.

Regarding the latest cuts on Thursday morning -- the third consecutive day of outages in the city -- Taipower Vice President Tsai Chih-meng (蔡志孟) said they were caused by problems with "aging underground transmission lines" and trees that had fallen due to heavy rains.

Taipower did not explain, however, why the outages had all occurred in Taoyuan.

"There are over 300,000 kilometers of power transmission lines in Taiwan, and sometimes there are problems with some of them," Taipower President Wang Yao-ting (王耀庭) said when asked about the issue at a Legislative hearing.

The string of power cuts in Taoyuan began on Tuesday, when 10,807 households in Dayuan and Zhongli districts, as well as the Qingpu Special District and Zhongzheng Arts and Cultural Business District, lost power.

On Wednesday night, 3,094 households in the city's Pingzhen District lost electricity, followed by another 9,937 households in Longtan District and 17 households in Taoyuan District on Thursday morning.

The "vast majority" of the households that lost power Thursday got it back within five minutes, and as of Thursday afternoon, power had been restored to all households across Taoyuan, according to Taipower.